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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > Philosophy of religion
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Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R2,847
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Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Hardcover, New)
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This landmark study examines the role played by the rediscovery of
the writings of the ancient atomists, Epicurus and Lucretius, in
the articulation of the major philosophical systems of the
seventeenth century, and, more broadly, their influence on the
evolution of natural science and moral and political philosophy.
The target of sustained and trenchant philosophical criticism by
Cicero, and of opprobrium by the Christian Fathers of the early
Church, for its unflinching commitment to the absence of divine
supervision and the finitude of life, the Epicurean philosophy
surfaced again in the period of the Scientific Revolution, when it
displaced scholastic Aristotelianism. Both modern social contract
theory and utilitarianism in ethics were grounded in its tenets.
Catherine Wilson shows how the distinctive Epicurean image of the
natural and social worlds took hold in philosophy, and how it is an
acknowledged, and often unacknowledged presence in the writings of
Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley. With
chapters devoted to Epicurean physics and cosmology, the
corpuscularian or "mechanical" philosophy, the question of the
mortality of the soul, the grounds of political authority, the
contested nature of the experimental philosophy, sensuality,
curiosity, and the role of pleasure and utility in ethics, the
author makes a persuasive case for the significance of materialism
in seventeenth-century philosophy without underestimating the depth
and significance of the opposition to it, and for its continued
importance in the contemporary world. Lucretius's great poem, On
the Nature of Things, supplies the frame of reference for this
deeply-researched inquiry into the origins of modern philosophy. .
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